Anonimo - Nuovo Trattato della Sfera - 1784

Title of the work: New Treatise of the Sphere. Lesson One. On the Sphere in general, and its motions.
Author: Anonymous (didactic-school treatise).
Publisher / Printing House: In Palermo, at the Royal Printing House. With Approval.
Year of publication: MDCCLXXXIV (1784).
Language: Italian.
Format: about 15 x 9.5 cm.
Number of pages: (2), 142.
Illustrations: one copper-engraved folded plate at the beginning of the volume, depicting a armillary sphere with astronomical details and constellations.

Rare and fascinating astronomical and geographical treatise of the late eighteenth century, printed in Palermo. Refined eighteenth-century edition of the "Nuovo Trattato della Sfera", printed in 1784 at the famous Royal Printing House of Palermo. The work is conceived with a strictly didactic purpose, structured through the classic and agile question-and-answer method (scientific catechism), used at the time in colleges and royal schools to introduce young students to the secrets of astronomy, cosmography, and celestial motions. The volume opens with the fundamental question: "What is the Sphere? Answer. The Sphere is a machine invented to represent the Universe..." The real strength of this exemplar is the presence of the large original copper-engraved plate, folded out of text, placed at the beginning of the volume. The engraving depicts in extremely detailed fashion an armillary sphere, complete with horizon, meridian, tropics, polar circles, and the ecliptic with the zodiac signs and the orbits of the then-known planets (including Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Earth and Venus).

Collation and completeness: the volume has been carefully bound and is absolutely complete. The work originally came with this single plate out of text, which is here perfectly preserved.
Rarity: scientific editions printed in Sicily at the end of the eighteenth century enjoy a historically much more limited edition size compared to the great editorial centers of contemporaries such as Venice or Naples, which makes this manual of notable interest for collectors of "Siciliana" and the history of science.

Binding: solid and contemporary (or slightly later) half-leather with decorated paper boards. Spine firmly attached to the book’s structure, with slight, normal superficial abrasions of the time at the edges and corners.
Internal: Pages firmly attached to the binding, intact, with a bit of physiological foxing of the time and some more extensive staining that does not in any way compromise readability. Frontispiece somewhat damaged, stained and with corner losses.
Illustrated plate: the engraving of the armillary sphere is intact, well printed, free of missing parts, with the normal editorial positioning folds, a small tear, and some stains.